Welcome to the 2013-2014 Pick'em! If you are rejoining us from last year, then you know the drill. For the rest of you, hi. Welcome to our annual football pool. All you do here is pick winners and losers, and guess at a couple of scores each week. Spreads are for suckers. Winners and losers, just like life. If you take first place for the season, you'll win something. What it is yet, I dunno. Lemme dig around my closet of old sports stuff. Last year's prize was a box of cereal from a washed up nobody which was so desirable that it has been returned to this year's prize pool to keep whatever else I come up with company. Prize details will be posted here as they occur.

Anyway, the league doesn't kick off until the first game of the regular season, so you have all of pre-season to truck on over to Yahoo Fantasy Sports and sign up. We're private group id # 6945, and the password is v3. It's totally simple, free, and open to all. Join us in our annual ritual of sports prediction.

That is, of course, unless you're yella. And now, the fine print:

1. Prizes will be awarded to the single player with the highest accumulated points for the complete regular season + all post-season games after each player's two lowest scoring weeks have been dropped, as determined by Yahoo's scoring system.
2. In the event of a tie, and the tied players are located in Phoenix, players will meet and kick paper footballs in a single-out distance contest. If tied players are not all located in Phoenix, each player must submit a photo of themselves with as many golf tees crammed in one nostril as they can comfortably manage. Dangling is encouraged, but duckfacing or otherwise contorting the lower face to support the tees will result in disqualification. The commissioner's count of visible tee heads will be swift, just, and final. Should the commissioner himself be one of the tied parties he will withdraw from the competition so he can judge impartially.
3. If the winner is located in Phoenix, the prizes will be hand-delivered by the commissioner. If the winner is outside of Phoenix, the prizes will be mailed with alacrity at the league commissioner's expense.

In addition to last year's fortified-with-iron prize, this year's winner will also nab this here Gridiron Gear card for the late Steve McNair (murdered in his sleep by a mistress) featuring actual scraps of his actual game jerseys from the Ravens and the Titans. No blood stains apparent on either. Number 31 of very limited set of 50, it's destined to be worth as much as, oh, a pile of Reggie Bush cards a few decades from now. Good luck!

Don't worry, this is just how Yahoo's Pick'Em league works. We have the season set to drop the two lowest scores (and thank god for that, after this past week) so that people can miss a week without tanking their chances at winning.

Because of this, the first 3 or 4 weeks of the season the numbers aren't very accurate because it's figuring in the drops. Once we're more than a month into the season, you'll see a more accurate representation of how you're doing.

And here we are, at the end of the regular season. First place at this point is a tie between Catch a Tiger by the Toe and Cuando lo veas with Catch a Tiger holding the tiebreaker advantage. Nice work, both of ya!

We ain't done yet, though - playoff time is here and these games get added in as well, so don't forget to make your picks before Saturday! This thing can still swing a few different ways!

Crazy mad props to Cuando lo Veas and adraper who both finished up with a record of 160-79 with a drop total of 13 points. This means that we go down to the tiebreaker, so sometime in the next week or two (watch your gtalk, guys) we will get together for the tiebreaking competition (as both tied players live here in the Valley), where each player will kick a paper football for distance. Longest kick wins the prize package and the bragging rights that come with winning such a prestigious competition!

Thanks again to everyone who played this year, and keep an eye on this thread for updates on the tiebreaker!

The 2013-2014 Pick'Em Tiebreaking Event (hereby referred to as PETE) will be held at 4pm Sunday, February 16 at Honey Bear's BBQ on Van Buren and 50th Street in Phoenix. If anyone local would care to come by and cheer on our competitors, please do!